installation

1. What is Test Fairy?

Test Fairy is a cloud based beta testing service. We used to use TestFlight but then Apple bought the company and made it for iOS only. Test Fairy allows your users to have a common beta testing experience whether they are using Android or iOS. In addition to providing a deployment tool for your ad hoc builds, Test Fairy provides the developer with useful analytics that help track down issues.

2. Invitation to be a Tester

The first step in becoming a beta tester is that you will receive an email which looks like the following image. You need to open this email on the iOS device that you want to use for testing (i.e. your iPhone or iPad). Then tap on the link which says “Please click here to register your mobile device”. This will send the developer a copy of that devices UDID.

The reason that you need to open the email on your iOS device is that in order for a developer to distribute apps outside the app store, they need to include the unique device ID (UDID) of your iPhone or iPad in the build. This prevents developers from selling outside the app store as it is quite a painful process to add a UDID and each developer is only allowed to add 100 devices of each type per year. For iOS apps, we can register 100 iPad, 100 iPhone, and 100 iPod Touch devices. This is in total, it doesn’t matter how many apps you have. Each time you add a device you need to add it in iTunes Connect, update the provisioning profile, import the new provisioning profile into your build, recompile and redistribute.

A UDID looks something like this – 2b6f0cc904d137be2e1730235f5664094b831186.

3. Registering your Device

Tapping the link in your email will open the following page in a web browser on your device. Tap on the Register Device button to send your UDID to the developer.

4. Install the Test Fairy Device Management Profile

Tapping on Register Device will take you to the device management profile installation screen. Tap Install in the top right corner.

To be able to monitor and limit usage on Apple devices, a device management profile is used. This profile allows the phone to send your UDID to the Test Fairy servers.